Ph.D. student Mr. Ruolei Xu, supervised by Professor Zhi Ning Chen from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering won the Student Paper Award – First Prize at the 2022 Marina Forum on Metantennas.
The Forum is an international platform focusing on the research of metamaterials and their applications to antenna engineering. The Student Paper Contest is open to the students who have published their work at prestigious journals. This year nine papers are selected in the finalists, and one paper is finally awarded the First Prize. The award recognizes innovative research conducted by the team, on a transformation-optics-based flat metamaterial Luneburg lens antenna for beamsteering with zero focal length.
The paper entitled “A hemispherical wide-angle beamsteering near-surface focal-plane metamaterial Luneburg lens antenna using transformation-optics” presents a hemispherical Luneburg lens with the focal plane near lens surface using a transformation-optics-based metamaterial lens concept for wide-angle beamsteering applications. In this work, the thickness of the proposed transformation-optics-based Luneburg lens is reduced by half compared to original Luneburg lens and fed by a stacked patch antenna linearly shifted at a distance of 4 mm (a focal-to-diameter ratio of 0.03) beneath the lens to achieve a wide beamsteering range. The proposed TO-based metalens antenna features compactness with a near-surface focal plane, wide beamscanning range, and easy fabrication, which shows potential applications in far-field imaging, radar, and B5G wireless communication.
